


Mr. Soul

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Some peripheral Steve/Bucky energy, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 09:20:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17200838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Vietnam, 1968. I drop by to pick up a reason...





	Mr. Soul

1968

\--

The kids were about eighteen. There were five of them in the squalid foxhole in what [?] years previous the soldier may have called No Man’s Land. Only one of the guns which swung instinctively in his direction was loaded — the blunt, snub-nosed Army-issue grenade launcher. And even this was nowhere near as loaded as the kids. 

“American,” said the soldier, raising his hands. The accent he had been using in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia on intermittent assignments since 1962 was bland and flavorless and his paperwork should he be asked to present it gave his provenance in Ohio. “I’ve got ammo.” 

He’d thought one of them was dead in the foxhole but this one started laughing. He was black and rail-thin and the nameplate on the breast of his uniform, whose sleeves he had cut off with a knife against the jungle heat, was G. Colby. They were all of them negligible threats and blasted on cocaine. The soldier got down in the foxhole and handed over his bag to one of the more collected among the kids, who promptly fumbled it and emptied the contents into the dust, spilling gleaming belts of shells. At the sight of this G. Colby’s laughter became more hysterical, indicating perhaps that he had taken a toxic dose or that he was experiencing early stages of what [?] years previous the soldier may have called Battle Fatigue. “Who’s in command,” the soldier asked them. 

“You, now,” said the one who’d fumbled the bag. He was shirtless and as such there was no way of telling his name but his accent said Georgia. “Sir,” he added as an afterthought. 

The soldier was not accustomed to being addressed in this way. “Who’s your commanding officer,” he said. 

Georgia looked at him with a perplexed expression suggesting this question was beyond stupid. The soldier reminded himself that he had been assigned to collect intelligence from American soldiers in the Song Thach Hanh valley before he might move on to complete his mission. As such they could not be killed yet no matter how annoying they were. 

“It’s Ath, by seniority,” said the one with the grenade launcher, indicating G. Colby, who by this point had stopped laughing aloud and was physically heaving in great silent sobs, hands pressed into the sockets of his eyes. “He’s been over here since ’64.” 

“Whose orders are you following?” 

“Orders?” 

“Yes — you must be following orders — ”

At this G. Colby stopped the heaving and removed his hands from his face. He regarded the soldier with consternation. When he spoke his voice was deeper and more controlled than had been expected. “Have they just — have you fallen from the sky?” 

The soldier had, but he also knew the fatigues he wore indicated Sergeant status and as such commanded a modicum of respect. “What,” he said, sharpening his voice, “are you all doing here.” 

“Fighting Charlie.” 

“Why?” 

“Do we need a why?” 

The soldier selected Georgia on which to level the interrogating eyes. It worked. “There’s a bridge,” Georgia said, gesturing indistinctly, “up the road, down the road, somewheres…” 

The bridge in question had fallen to the Viet Cong about two weeks previous at which point a strategic decision had been made to abandon it. The majority of those defending the position had pulled back downriver toward Hue, except for a few scattered encampments which had either not received or chosen to ignore the order. That was rather the problem. It was why the soldier had been deployed. 

“So your orders are to defend the bridge.” 

“Something like that,” said G. Colby. “Got any morphine?” 

His eyes had gone a little sharp. Already he was shifting through the machine gun belts that had fallen from the bag with one bare foot. “No Syrettes,” said the soldier, “just pills.” 

“We could snort em,” said grenade launcher. 

“You cook it with water in a spoon,” said a sunburnt white boy slouched beside the rusted machine gun. 

“We haven’t got a fucking spoon,” said Georgia, who looked hungry too. “Or syringes — and anyway the matches are wet…” 

“How long have you all been here,” the soldier asked them. 

“Time doesn’t exist,” said G. Colby immediately. He had found the medical kit in the pack. Crouched over it in the bright red mud, bullet belts spilling yellow-bronze in twists over the foot-tramped trench, he reminded the soldier of something out of mind. “You know that,” he said. “Want one.” 

“I don’t need one,” the soldier said, “I have no pain.” 

G. Colby’s brow tightened as though this were very sad. “Really?” he said.

“Really.” 

G. Colby turned heel in the dust gracefully and threw the pack to grenade launcher. “Grind em up,” he said. “Make sure you do the right pills this time god damn it.” 

“Ain’t never gonna make that mistake again, I told you, Ath…” 

This nickname was incompatible with G. Colby’s name as presented. The soldier filed this piece of information away. 

“One for all of us except the Sergeant,” G. Colby said. “And Jackson would you please do us the very great honor of putting on the Buffalo Springfield…” 

“Yes, sir!” 

These orders were a pleasure to follow. Jackson, the sunburnt white boy, unearthed an unfamiliar machine from a pile of belongings draped in discarded uniforms. The first sound emanating from this machine was a kind of muted whir. Then a glorious blast of unfamiliar sound. By this means it seemed likely they had long since alerted every VC fighter in the vicinity to their exact location; that they had not already been killed seemed to indicate Charlie didn’t think they were worth the energy. Now there was a human voice coming from the machine: “O hello Mr. Soul I drop by to pick up a reason…” 

“What’s this?” 

“The Buffalo Springfield. You know, _something’s happening here…_ ” 

“He doesn’t listen to this kind of music,” G. Colby said poisonously. “He’s an officer.” 

“What do you listen to, Sarge?” 

The soldier’s mouth moved and “Jazz” came out. 

[ Blues vinyl from Vocalion and Paramount borrowed from Tom Stoli who lived on the third floor of the flophouse on the corner of Oak and Guernsey in a single cold room which smelled of mothballs and the power would flicker in and out in the middle of the track slowing down the record to an alien sort of crawl — _I walked all night with my .44 in my hand —_ ] 

“So you are hip.” 

“Huh?” 

“Hip, I said.” 

Grenade launcher had laid out five lines of smashed-up morphine tablet on the surface of a red Moleskine notebook clearly frequently used for this purpose. “Who’s first?” 

“Linden is,” said G. Colby, indicating a sandy-haired boy in the corner who had not yet moved or spoken. He struggled to his feet, dislodging flies, and crept forward. He was wounded to the leg judging by his limp and the black stain on his fatigues. It was difficult to discern whether this or an unmet craving for opiates was the source of the pale peakedness to his narrow face. He knelt painfully as in penitence before grenade launcher who offered him the body and the blood of Christ; this disappeared up his nose. 

The music changed. “Oh, the storm is threatening my very life today…” 

“How is it, Sean,” said Georgia. 

Linden got shakily to his feet, supported by Colby. His eyes were out of focus. Wonderingly, he pressed the back of his hand against his nose. “Good,” he said, a little faintly. Then he said, “Soviet slugs.” 

Perhaps they would have to be killed sooner than was optimal. 

“What?” 

Linden kicked the bullet belts in the mud weakly with his bad foot. “These are Soviet slugs,” he said measuredly. Then, significantly less measuredly, “I gotta — someone fast forward this fuckin song, it gives me the fear.” 

“Pussy,” said Jackson, but he hit a button on the machine and the sound blurred again into a wash of static. It cut back in to a piano riff and a smoky-voiced man singing with a choir of girls — “You feeling alright? I’m not feeling too good myself…” 

“Soviet slugs,” said G. Colby, lifting an eyebrow. Any semblance of suspicion he had hoped to possess had been steamrollered by the line he’d hit. Clearly his tolerance was higher than Linden’s, who was sprawled back in his corner like a ragdoll, moving a filthy nail-bitten hand through the still air in waves vaguely tuned to the music, like the passenger in a station wagon on a summer drive through the cornfields — 

The soldier was surprised by this frame of reference and filed this away as well to be reported later. They always seemed interested in his personal reactions when he interacted with American ground troops. 

“Soviet slugs,” said the soldier affirmatively. “Thought you’d be happy with whatever you could get.” 

“You just found em.” 

“Let’s say I did.” 

Colby’s mouth moved inscrutably. But at last he said, “Let’s say you did.” 

Each among them now had sampled the powdered morphine tablets and only Colby was still standing. “Finally,” Jackson slurred, “some good shit.” 

“Where’d you get it?” 

“Classified,” said the soldier. 

“What about this,” Linden said. He fumbled with his fatigue jacket, which he had been using as a pillow, and unearthed a sheet of thick perforated paper from a hidden pocket. “You ever had anything like this?” 

Lysergic acid diethylamide. With the enhanced metabolism the trip lasted about twenty-five minutes of ransacking terror. A terror delightful in its absurdity. An organic sort of green terror so unlike the accustomed variety to feel — healing, perhaps, was the first known sensation stumbled upon in comparison. He watched the five of them rot and himself rot and the jungle grow back up again around the pockmarks from shelling and the great inky swaths of napalm burn. This was intensely pleasing to the point that in the short comedown he wondered if he might perhaps be punished for it when he returned [home?]. They had a mobile read on his vitals via a radio transmitter implanted somewhere and could track what they called “pleasure seeking behavior” aka P.S.B. which was supposed to have been programmed out of him but which hadn’t really worked. They had made a lot of mistakes. He couldn’t mention their mistakes to them because when he did they didn't believe him. 

When it was over he asked for another. 

“Are you serious,” said Colby woozily. Jackson was lying in the mud pulling the belts of Soviet shells over himself like a rattling blanket. By the position of the sun there were four hours left til dusk, when it seemed likely VC fire would recommence. 

“Well you guys plowed through all my morphine…” 

Colby laughed, again insanely. He went to Linden and tenderly unearthed the remaining tabs from the pocket of the jacket balled up under his head. “Maybe you got — sometimes they soak up funny in the blotter,” he said, offering the soldier another tiny stamp-like rip of paper cupped in the palm of his hand. The red mud of the trench had got into all the creases of his knuckles and palm-lines like mold in tile grout — another sourceless metaphor the soldier filed away for his report. “Sometimes you get fake ones,” Colby went on, “but these are real — Sean got them from someone who got them from someone who was in the Harvard Project.” 

The soldier felt it dissolve on his tongue. Extraneous colors without known names filtered in like drops of pigment in water. Colby went to the machine again and dislodged a small black rectangle, the object which was vibrating sound out of itself, and he turned it and tucked it back into its pocket again. He put the machine through a series of clicks as though he were arming a mysterious weapon. The projectile which was fired was a new voice echoing in the foxhole — “Some folks were born made to wave the flag — ” 

“What’s this,” said the soldier. 

“Creedence,” grenade launcher said. “Creedence Clearwater Revival.” 

“Macdonald made the tape in the hospital in Saigon,” said Jackson. “After nervous breakdown number two.” 

“Whatever happened to his ass…” 

“You don’t remember?” Colby said. “He stepped on a landmine in Khe Sanh. Sean and I saw it, he like evaporated into this huge red — ” 

“Don’t fuckin talk about it Ath,” Linden groaned, covering his eyes with his hands, “it’s giving me the fear.” 

“You’ve always got the fear.” 

“It’s from dropping so much acid.” 

The soldier laughed along with the others. Linden lifted a middle finger tremulously aloft. Lying how he was with his bony knees bent up the cuffed trouserleg of his fatigues had ridden up to show an array of badly wrapped bandages stained with blood and mud and worse. The soldier wondered if anyone else had noticed that the bruise-blackened skin around the bandage displayed signs of deadly sepsis. 

[ In that place they were counting off the days with a stone scraped against the wall and eventually someone had started also writing there the names of the dead and the disappeared just to keep track because otherwise nobody would have remembered and he sat in the back corner soothing dying men whose names he didn’t know and to whom he had never spoken before apart from giving orders until they died or until someone else had the terrible mercy to suffocate them in their sleep — ] 

The soldier looked away. He met Colby’s eyes in which there was a kind of covenant. 

[ Fine, he said, fine, I’m fine, but — “Don’t you at least want to see the medic, I carried you out of there, you know, maybe you should just check — ” and by lanternlight he sat in his bunk watching one of the bruises heal like a storm moving at dusk. I don’t want to talk about it any more, pal. Okay? ] 

“Where’d you come from,” Colby said. 

“You already said. I fell from the sky.” 

“Before that.” 

The soldier remembered the papers in his pocket. “Cleveland,” he said. 

“I mean what base,” Colby said. “Sledgehammer, Leghorn…” 

If it was true that he had been in the war since ’65 it would be difficult to get anything past him. The soldier thought quickly. “Camp Evans,” he said. 

“That shithole,” Jackson said. He was staring at the sky, eyes wide open, unblinking. “We heard the PAVN blew the ammo dump and we said, good riddance.” 

“What happened to your patriotism, Jacky,” laughed grenade launcher. 

“Coming under friendly fire’ll fuckin do it,” Linden muttered, shifting the folded jacket under his head. 

So they had thought it was an accident. Based on their youth, fear, and obvious drug fixation, the soldier had doubted their remaining in this foxhole in enemy territory indicated hostile status. Because they were so loaded, and so innocent and so in denial of their own innocence, it made a kind of terrible sense that they hadn't understood they had been deliberately targeted by American helicopter troops operating under MACV mission parameters. 

Sympathy was not regulation. 

“What’s your mission,” Colby said. The soldier registered that perhaps this was an interrogation. 

“It’s classified.” 

Colby smiled, showing no teeth. Linden had opened one bloodshot blue-green eye to watch between them with a bored curiosity that suggested he was accustomed to Colby’s activities of this variety. “Can’t you give us a hint?” Colby said. 

“No,” said the soldier. He thought they had already been given several extremely obvious hints which they had not deciphered — hints that if he himself had been given and had not deciphered he would be punished and he would deserve it. 

“Are you Studies and Observations,” grenade launcher said, not a question. The soldier recognized this phrase from his briefing. It would not be included on the identification he carried because the existence of the department itself was classified. “He’d have to kill us if he told us,” grenade launcher explained to the rest. “My brother was S.O.G.” 

“I thought he was a Green Beret.” 

“It’s the same — oh my god. Didn’t they explain all this at Fort Bliss?” 

“They were in a bit of a hurry…” 

The mood settled, along with the high, as the sky darkened. With about an hour of light left the five boys crouched close together in the mud like starved nomadic wanderers around an animal carcass and ravenously shared two MREs with their fingers. These meals came from a selection stowed away in grenade launcher’s things, which appeared to be running perilously low. They offered the soldier food but he would not need to eat for at least another two days. This programming at least, though initially disastrous, had been successful. 

At last Linden turned off the music machine and hid it again in the pile of coats and belongings. Out of this newfound quietude came the swelling orchestral tones of the animal sounds and the not-animal sounds in the surrounding forest, vexed to a powerful sustained scream by the last dregs of the LSD. Jackson and Colby strung the first of the Soviet bullet belts into the machine gun and coiled up the others beside the action where they could be easily loaded. Grenade launcher checked over the rest of his ammunition and arranged it carefully close at hand. Georgia and Linden carried rifles, but only Georgia’s M-16 was outfitted for any kind of shooting at night. Linden’s Stoner 63 had clearly been issued to some long-dead Marine at the beginning of the war. All the guns seemed like toys beside the soldier’s Colt Commando, which the boys eyed with mixed curiosity and trepidation. 

“They’re in the forest to the north-northwest,” Colby explained to the soldier as he loaded his little Colt sidearm. “When we were at the bridge we, um, overheard some of the intelligence. There’s a VC field hospital over that hill.” 

“Hill nine-twenty-six,” said Jackson. 

The soldier filed this piece of information away. They had been unsure of the exact location of the hospital. Now that he had the intelligence necessary to complete the mission he began considering the subsequent objective. Already he had made note of the weapons on each boy’s person. 

“We don’t exchange fire every night,” Colby was explaining. “And anyway we can’t fire on medics. But in the dark, you know, we can’t tell if they’re medics.” 

“One time we thought we heard them but it was tapirs,” said Georgia. 

The whites of their eyes in the spreading darkness. From the pharmacopeia evidently stored in his jacket pocket Linden produced a nearly-empty vial of cocaine powder and they all did bumps from under their filthy thumbnails. Some was offered to the soldier, who rubbed it into his gums. He understood this high too would be abbreviated. He also understood that he had on his person single-use doses of numerous stimulants including methamphetamine that had been calibrated precisely to his metabolism. It would not do to take one of these in front of the kids, any of whom would probably be killed by such a dose if they took it. 

They all six settled in and waited for nightfall. The hills darkened and the sky seemed to switch as though orchestrated by the lighting designer of a high school theater production [?] through a fluorescent color wheel in attempt to express every feeling of which it was capable before it was erased. Evidently the boys had seen this all before; they had all busied themselves with preparations to the guns except for Jackson, who was rubbing soot around his eyes for no practical reason. The soldier was not certain he had ever seen a sunset before, though logically he must have seen sunsets before because he was certain he had lived other days. He was even relatively certain he had lived other days in Vietnam. Evidently those days had not had sunsets or the sunsets had been excised. 

“Left,” grenade launcher whispered, to Colby beside him, though the soldier could hear it, gesturing with the blunt nose of his weapon. “Movement off to the left.” 

The forest inhaled and exhaled. Colby looked back at the soldier — the darkness had rendered his expression illegible — and then toward the treeline again. 

“Seven of them,” said the soldier, moving forward to join the boys’ line. “Don’t fire ’til they do.” 

“But — ”

“Seven?” 

“Who’s the ranking officer here?” 

“You are, sir,” said Georgia glumly, though the question had been quite obviously rhetorical. 

[ The row of pines shifting in the gray wind. Everywhere whispers. Reality was a held breath. Primordial stillness. For a moment he thought he alone caught gilded glimpse of the shape of things before life was breathed into the world like sparks off a cigarette butt — the world before consciousness. Then — ] 

A spray of bullets struck the back of the foxhole where the soldier had lain hours previous in the dust tripping. Their sound arrived cartoonishly after they did, echoing in the long valley and the trees. The boys watched the dust burst, and then they turned to the soldier. “What the fuck are you waiting for,” he said. 

Gunfire shattered the air, the night, shredded the foliage and the dust into clouds of matter and sound. Only Colby had any kind of target-shooting prowess about him, the soldier noted. Grenade launcher fired his weapon and it went embarrassingly wide, striking a copse of trees ablaze a good twenty yards from the enemy party. Linden cackled and then ducked to dodge a round that went over his head. 

The firelight was brighter than the moon. The soldier inhaled. Calibration. The enemy fighters carried guns no better than the boys’, just as old, except for one, who carried a Soviet issue RPG-2 anti-tank gun. The soldier had seen these weapons before, though he wasn’t quire sure where. He exhaled. This fighter put a hand to his chest and collapsed. 

“Did you — ”

“Shut up.” 

Colby had taken care of two, though one wasn’t quite dead. In training the soldier had learned that mercy was not regulation. It was a form of P.S.B. and was unnecessary to the point of punishable in his work. He inhaled and lined the shot up and exhaled. The twitching stopped. Now there were four. They were mounting the hill toward the hospital, shouting in Vietnamese. One had picked up the anti-tank gun, so the soldier killed him. Three. He watched the steep trail they took through the woods, carefully consigning the route to memory, and when they had reached the edge of his enhanced sight and as such the twinned edge of their usefulness he felled him with three close-quartered shots. 

The boys had not realized they were all dead and were still shooting. They didn’t stop until they saw him sit back and set about checking over his gun for damage, as he had been trained to do after its every use. 

“Did you just — ”

“Don’t stop now,” said the soldier, “those trees were giving us funny looks earlier.” 

Linden cackled again. He stumbled when he got to his feet, but he came over to the soldier and clapped his back. This close the soldier could feel his fever from the infected wound. His eyes were a little swimming. He’d die soon; probably he knew it. “How about it,” he said. “A fucking sniper.” 

The soldier looked to Colby, who knew it too. He had pursed his lips so tightly the soldier could tell he was chewing them together in his mouth. The rest of the boys were smiling relieved, exhausted smiles; Colby’s intense expression seemed foreign, displaced, uncanny, almost threatening. 

“A bit of good luck for once,” Linden said. His pale hand wrapped the soldier’s shoulder. Gray moon-rime of blood and dust under the ragged fingernails. 

[ I don't like that you're here, he almost said, didn’t say, watching — {?} — watching you across the barracks, across the rocky glens and the silent forest beds where the men snatched sleep, across dreamless seconds, across great applauding crowds, train cars, gaping chasms; I don’t like that you’re here, I don't like any of this, I don’t like you like this, I don’t like what it means; it means that war touches everything, war ruins everything, war seeps in and spreads; war is black mold — war isn’t quite death, but it’s not life. War blows spores. War consumes and degrades. I know because war is in my blood — war is my blood. And now it’s yours, dear god, now it’s yours… ] 

The boys went for their packs for food and drugs, ammo, a well-worn girlie magazine, patting the soldier’s back, ruffling his hair. 

[ “What’re you thinking about, pal?” Nothing — oh, nothing, thinking about nothing at all. Laughter. I never known you to be thinking about nothing, B— ] 

Something hurt down the back of his skull — like cold water but jagged. Ice — knife — ice — 

The soldier inhaled sharply. 

“You alright?” 

[ The name sawed off. Whatever they used wasn’t sharp and it took them a while. At least they cauterized the place where it was, once it was gone. A white room. He forgot time. A black room. He knew he was alive because he could hear planes flying overhead, so they patched the walls with soundproofing. There was no world anymore, so he un-happened. They brought him back into the false womb and then they started again. The slap rung his ears. Kill her. Kill him. Back to the hole. They learned electricity. He learned electricity. Kill him — shock — sleep. Kill shock sleep. Execute mission objective. Soldier — what is the objective? What is the objective? Kill shock sleep. What is the objective? What is — ] 

One spray of bullets was all. Like a sudden shock of summer thunder just above. None of them so much as said anything, and they fell, or they broke where they lay, twisting artfully, like dropped ragdolls. There wasn’t even much blood, so skilled was the soldier. Jackson had cast his arm up reflexively in front of his face but the bullet had kissed through his skull under his ear. Like this their brains were all the same. 

Regret was not regulation. Horror was not regulation. 

The soldier checked over his gun for damage. When this was done he turned to the five bodies to search them, only to find that there were only four bodies, because G. Colby was still alive. The dark eyes struggled and searched and focused at last upon the soldier’s face. 

“I know you,” said G. Colby. “Ghost. I know you…” 

He rifled through Colby’s pockets in search of the papers. The blooming black gut-wound spreading over his fatigues. Five minutes in this heat or less. Already the dark eyes were glazed with pain. 

“My uncle was in the 107th,” said G. Colby. “In France.”

Testing. The papers from his pockets were of little import. Sentimentally he had kept his draft card. The identification he carried gave his full name — George Atherton Colby Jr. — and his place of birth in St. Louis, Missouri. The last item was a sealed letter which the soldier opened with a fingernail. Colby was still talking. 

“He had these comic books.” There was blood in his mouth now. He was studying the soldier’s face with an intent gaze visible only in periphery. Inexplicably, impossibly, the soldier sensed a heightened threat level. “You know where this is going,” Colby slurred, though the soldier didn’t. “I know you, ghost,” he said again. “Azzano — they left you for dead — ”

The threat level shifted nearly visibly from yellow to a sick radioactive orange. 

“He said you were never the same after that. But Captain Rogers — ”

“Where’d you get this?” 

He noted with building horror that the envelope was shaking just so in his living hand. Through the moon-white paper was typewritten text bearing assorted MACV classification seals. 

Colby’s eyes focused and unfocused like a telescope lens. “ — he trusted you,” he continued, as though the soldier hadn’t said anything. “Uncle Ron said, maybe he shouldn’t’ve… kept saying that until the day you — ”

“Where,” said the soldier, clutching the metal hand in the collar of Colby’s fatigues, “did you get this.” 

“Where does anyone get anything in this place. Off someone dead.” 

“Who?” 

“Officer. I don’t know.” 

“Where?” 

“Wouldn’t you like to — ”

He tightened his grip at Colby’s neck. Under normal circumstances he was well versed in interrogation. Every circumstance was supposed to be a normal circumstance — this was almost the entire point of his existence — but they must have made another mistake. “Where,” the soldier said again. 

Colby just looked at him. A bubble of blood at the edge of his mouth popped against his cheek. “You don't fool me,” he said. Then he died. Everything was still. The soldier shook him. His eyes were open but there was nothing in there. 

Consider subsequent objective. 

The soldier dropped Colby’s body and stood. With the living hand he pulled the letter from the envelope. It was written in a code so simple it could barely be called code. He crouched in the foxhole again and rifled through all the dead boys’ pockets for a pen. Linden had one folded in a sheaf of jungle-rotting graphing paper on which he had sloppily transcribed some Wilfred Owen-esque poetry. The solder tucked this in the pocket of his fatigue pants, and then he wondered why he had. And then he wondered who Wilfred Owen was. 

The thing to do with these thoughts — intrusive thoughts — was to reclassify them. One of the doctors called them glimpses. Glimpses at what precisely was not defined. Just glimpses. He took the poems out of his pocket again and looked at the most recent one in the harsh moonlight. 

_When the helicopter fire cutting red-black-green_  
_we crouched in the foxhole and hid from the scene._  
_Sit on your helmet, they told us at Fort Ord,_  
_to protect your balls. This wisdom struck a chord_  
_even with those excited to kill. They had not known_  
_they might come to this place and un-become a man._  
_Of the honest truth they had not yet been shown_  
_any inkling of strategy or procedure or plan,_  
_because there wasn’t one and because they didn’t care.  
_ _There were only the bombs bursting in air…_

This thing magnifies all sensation. All feeling — all terror. All certainty. Or at least it did for lesser men. Which was why the soldier had — happened. This had been explained. 

Sympathy was not regulation. 

He put the poems in his pocket. With Linden’s pen he decoded the cryptogram into plain text on the verso of the letter: 

_Per MACV-SOG 10 Aug 1968 the bridge at Lang Ke has been abandoned. The United States Armed Forces hereby withdraw all troops from the vicinity effective immediately in order to streamline operations for implementation of Project Lerna. This withdrawal will be enforced with extreme prejudice and any troops remaining in vicinity as of 10 Aug 1968 will be subject to court-martial._

Once read he burned it. 

The hospital was over Hill 926. He took Georgia’s rifle and refreshed the ammo clip and packed up the remaining bullet belts into his bag again. He took the leftover tabs of LSD from Linden’s coat pocket and on final thought he took the rectangle of music from the sound machine. He didn't know how to eject the rectangle using the buttons so he pulled the door off the pocket with the metal hand. When he took the rectangle out a kind of stretchy iridescent black ribbon started coming out of the bottom of it and he was obliged to wind it back together carefully in the moonlight. He put the rectangle in the chest pocket of his fatigues with the paperwork and dug out one of the single-use syringes of methamphetamine from his personal medical kit. The needles were sharp enough to break through canvas for field use. He uncapped it and punched it into the meat of his thigh. 

It took a moment for everything to turn sharp — like the projectionist in a picture show doctoring the film from above… Sharp. The sharp self, the honed self. Not much fit on the blade of a knife besides its razor edge. He could elucidate now which forest sounds were human footsteps. He climbed out of the foxhole into the living night — 

[ ? ] 

\--

It wasn’t like waking up, not really. It was like realizing that you were conscious in the middle of it. It was a dark room like all the other dark rooms. About one third of the meaning of “home” — the place from whence he came and the place to which he was going. But while he was there, there was usually not much, if anything. 

“Who’s Wilfred Owen,” said the soldier. 

“World War I pacifist poet, British officer, probably lover of Siegfried Sassoon,” said Pierce. He looked up from the clipboard upon which he was making notes. “Why?” 

“Was — nothing. I don’t remember.” 

“The technicians found those poems in your pocket. Who wrote them?” 

“An army private. Sean Linden.” 

Pierce looked up at the mirror which was not a mirror because he was checking to make sure someone behind the mirror which was not a mirror had got Sean Linden’s name for research purposes. 

“They were a little Owen-ish, I guess,” said Pierce. “That’s why you thought of him. But you were telling me about the hospital.” 

“Right,” said the soldier. “Um…” 

Threat level red. Red beyond red. It was in the precise furrowing of Pierce’s eyebrows. This particular red which was a sudden wash throughout the entire world. Red becoming black a learned sort of red-black approximating a shadow of a sensation which could barely be remembered or named. He tried reflexively to remove himself from the restraints, to no avail. These too had been precisely calculated, and there had been numerous mistakes. 

“God fucking damn it,” Pierce said. He turned back toward the mirror which was not a mirror. “Barker, what the fuck — ” 

The voice from above came into the dark room. “We’re working on it, sir.” 

“I thought you said this wouldn’t happen again!” 

“Complication of the singularity, sir.” 

“I can’t fucking believe this,” said Pierce. “Get Donaldson in here, ASAP, and tell him I’ve got a real fucking bone to pick.” 

“Of course, sir.” 

Pierce turned back to the soldier, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Did you burn the hospital,” he said, “like we talked about?” 

“I, I mean I think — ”

“Oh my god. Barker.” 

“Working on it, sir… try the trigger code, maybe.” 

“Which one?” 

“The Russian one.” 

“Are we just fucking shooting in the dark here?” 

“Unfortunately we are, sir…” 

Pierce ran a hand through his hair. The soldier noted that there was a bit of sweat at the temples and at the nape of his neck, not that it was altogether overwarm in the room. “Can’t we just wipe him and start from square one.” 

“We might lose the data; I don't think it’s quite set…” 

“This isn’t fucking jello, Barker!” 

“With all due respect sir, the human mind — ” 

“I don’t fucking care,” said Pierce. “This was all supposed to be fixed last time. If we lose it we lose it. Get the aerial images from SOG to command and tell them that’s the best we’ve got for now.” 

“Sir — ”

“That’s an order. Wipe him and we’ll try again.” 

The technician beside him greased his temples with conductive unguent and got the black rubber guard in his mouth. He was incapable of remembering the shock in the usual way one contained memory, which was to say he could never quite remember it in his mind. It was not the provenance of mind. Its very purpose was anti-mind and/or un-mind. His body remembered and prepared itself cell by cell tightening against being shaken apart. 

“Can we try something, Barker,” Pierce said, watching the soldier. 

“Of course, sir.” 

“That cassette he had on him — put that on.” 

“It’s just rock and roll music, sir.” 

“I know what it damn well is. Put it on.” 

There was some fuddling behind the mirror. Behind him — outside his vision but with its mechanical movement audible — the crown descended. The soldier felt as though his breath would not fully inflate his lungs. There was no real or logical memory to fear which itself was fearsome. The technician guided it to where it rested across the planes of his skull. Pierce had stepped back into the corner and poised his pencil at the clipboard again with a grim expression etched across the handsome features. 

First: from above, the music, piped through better-quality speakers and clear as crystal in the dark room. 

“O hello Mr. Soul I drop by to pick up a reason — ” 

Second: a violence beyond pain. White light being torn into his mind. Cleansing all before it. 

“ — for the thought that I caught that my head is the event of the season — ” 

[ As out of a dream a gentle touch disconnected the IV drip from the cannula and slid the needle carefully out from the vein in the back of his hand where it had plugged this curse into his bloodstream now for days and said his name — {?} — and said his name again and he was certain he was dying and this was an angel but he opened his eyes — ] 

\--

“ — not exactly what we were promised when we agreed to implement Project Lerna.” 

Through some veil he saw Pierce was speaking to a much-decorated man in fatigues. They were standing across the room by the door. Closer at hand a few technicians had activated certain programming in the metal arm which allowed them to clean and polish the plates and ports. They had also activated the paralysis mod. The soldier’s saliva was pooling in the back of his throat and sooner or later he would choke on it and they would have to vacuum it out with the suction machine they used when they cleaned and/or replaced his teeth. The decorated man glanced occasionally in the direction of the soldier and the attending staff with a kind of embarrassed fear. No doubt this was why Pierce had chosen to hold the meeting here. 

“We agreed on strategic operations of unconventional warfare,” said Pierce cooly. 

“We also agreed on your most covert possible operations. Lest you forget this has become a war of public opinion.” 

“As we discussed I consider that the strength of the project, sir. The eyes of the world are on American troops fighting communism.” 

The decorated man was quiet for a moment. His eyes met the soldier’s and quickly moved away. “I only worry,” he said, “about… subtlety.” 

“How so?” 

“The use of this… asset… guaranteed subtlety. Secrecy. The highest levels of classification. Because it is a secret of yours as well. I do not doubt the efficacy of your other tactics. I only doubt that the hand of Hydra will remain invisible — which of course would undermine our entire mission.” 

“We’ve had a singularity on each assignment, sir,” Pierce told the decorated man. “It would be riskier to keep deploying him. And anyway, you all don’t need our help. You’re doing a fine job yourselves at My Lai.” 

You think you comprehend war, but war keeps surprising you. War keeps surprising you even after you think you have lost your capacity for surprise.

The decorated man flushed as though he’d been slapped. “I beg your pardon — ”

Something moved in Pierce’s face like a serpent beneath the skin. It was an expression he put on when he wanted to smile or laugh but smiling or laughing would be considered gauche and/or psychopathic. “I’m saying the United States military does not need Hydra’s help proving the existence of chaos,” he said. 

The decorated man left in a dignified huff with a half-assed _Hail Hydra_ that made Pierce’s upper lip curl. Once he had been escorted through the airlock Pierce hooked a foot like a soccer player [?] around a stool that had rolled into the corner and pulled it over to the soldier’s side. “Now you see what kind of pressure I’m under,” he said, sitting down with a long-suffering groan. “And what kind of fucking idiots I have to deal with.” 

He emphasized _fucking idiots_ so that it might have applied to any of the technicians, several of whom flinched, or the soldier, or the decorated man in the airlock, who might’ve heard it through the layers of steel. 

“Lucky boy,” Pierce said. He scanned the soldier’s face. Slowly, almost tentatively, that suppressed smile from a few minutes earlier showed itself in the wide, mobile mouth. “You’re going back under.”

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> for [floggingink](http://floggingink.tumblr.com/) and [ababelofprose](https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/ababelofprose)
> 
> this story is named after and based on the buffalo springfield song ["mr. soul."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrFvZYTPQaw)
> 
> maybe more of this coming, maybe, one day, tentatively


End file.
